Drought conditions are extreme
in Africa, especially in the countries of Niger,
Ghana, Uganda, and Burkina Faso. Parts of India are experiencing drought, as well as Thailand.
And not surprisingly, given its fragile environment, Australia is experiencing its worst
drought in 100 years. Sydney is so desperate for
water that it is spending $1.5 billion (US) to construct a desalinization
plant. Meanwhile, Spain and Portugal
are also experiencing severe droughts that have increased political tensions
between the two countries, caused conflicts between different Spanish states,
and resulted in large-scale fires.

What may be surprising to many
Americans, given how little the national media cover the story, is that large
areas of the United States are experiencing severe droughts as well. I use the
plural “droughts” intentionally here, as the droughts are occurring in several
major watersheds, including watersheds that normally have abundant water.

The drought that has grabbed
the most national attention is in the Mississippi Watershed, which includes the
Mississippi River and all of its tributaries
and drains 41% of the lower 48 states. The watershed is the third largest in
the world (after the Amazon Watershed and the Congo River Watershed) and
includes all or parts of 31 states. This drought stretches from southern Wisconsin and Illinois
through eastern Iowa, most of Missouri and Arkansas,
most of Kentucky and western Tennessee,
and parts of Louisiana.
Billions of dollars in crops have been lost. The Ohio River is at its lowest
level in 60 years and parts of the Ohio and Mississippi are turning into
“sandbars” according to a recent New YorkTimes story (8/15/05, pp. A1 &
A16), one of the few national stories on the drought.

A major drought in the heart of
the Mississippi Watershed is cause enough for alarm. But it is not the only one.
Parts of New England, including Rhode Island, Connecticut, and the HudsonValley in New York are also experiencing drought. The
Great Lakes Watershed, which includes Michigan,
parts of Minnesota, Wisconsin,
Illinois, Indiana,
Ohio, western Pennsylvania
and New York, as well as a large part of Ontario and Quebec,
is also suffering from a drought. The Columbia River Watershed, which includes
the state of Washington, most of Oregon and Idaho, and Montana west of the continental divide, is also experiencing
a drought inland from the PacificCoast. Finally, parts of Colorado, New Mexico,
and Arizona,
(covering parts of the Colorado River Watershed and the Rio Grande Watershed)
are also in drought.

What is happening here?

Cycles of more or less
precipitation occur naturally, sometimes taking the form of periodic drought or
periodic overabundance (given a region’s average precipitation) of rain or snow.
But what we are observing worldwide goes beyond the normal historical
fluctuations. We are confronted with two grave problems that threaten to turn
the planet into a desert: The first is
diminishing supply and increasing demand; the second is global warming.

While the world is covered with
water, only 3% of the world’s water is fresh water. This small fraction of the
world’s water is increasingly being consumed by humans or contaminated by
industrial pollution, making it unfit for humans or other animals. The
increasing demand and diminishing supply is turning fresh water into a valuable
and much coveted commodity. Corporations are now trying to privatize municipal
water supplies and secure control over underground and surface supplies. The
increasing demand and diminishing supply is also producing political battles,
not only in places like Africa and Spain,
but in the U.S.
as well. The Great Lakes Watershed, the largest single source of fresh surface water
in the world, is one battleground, as reported recently in the New York Times (8/12/05, pp. A1 & A16).

Ancient civilizations in the
past have collapsed because they abused their water supplies. But our problem
is magnified many fold by human-caused global warming. Global warming, which
exceeds in both scope and severity the natural drought cycles that doomed such
ancient civilizations as the Anasazi, reduces the snow pack, dries the soil, and
reduces surface water and river flows. Combined with the massive deforestation
(which increases drought and soil erosion also) and the draining of the
aquifers (which feed many rivers, lakes, and streams), global warming could
doom us all to die of thirst and starvation.

If you think I am exaggerating
or that I am a member of the lunatic fringe, consider this: Russian and British
scientists reported in the Guardian (8/11/05),
one of Great Britain’s most respected newspapers, that an area of permafrost in
Western Siberia equal to the area of France and Germany combined is starting to
thaw for the first time since it formed 11,000 years ago. As it thaws, the
permafrost will release billions of tons of methane, a greenhouse gas twenty
times more potent than carbon dioxide. A release of this amount of methane would
produce runaway global warming.

A two-part solution is required
to deal with this crisis. Both parts go against the inherent logic of the
capitalist world system, a logic which reduces
everything to a commodity and which seeks to maximize the profits of the owners
of capital, no matter what the cost to individuals or society. The first is
what the Spanish water activists term a “new culture of water.” This new
culture treats water not as a commodity but as a shared communal resource that
must be protected and used in a sustainable fashion. The idea of a new culture
of water entails an individual’s right to water for drinking, bathing and food,
but not the right of individuals to waste water or to use it to make profits or
pollute it. The new culture of water translates, politically, into the
democratic and sustainable use of water.

The second part of the solution
requires the massive reorganization of the world economy away from fossil fuels
to sustainable energy and conservation. This, too, well never happen under
capitalism. Again, we are forced to the same conclusion: a democratic,
sustainable socialism or ecocide. There is no third way.